Jeffrey Pocock

ABSTRACTThe Desert and the City and Rational Enthusiasm are experiments in comparative historiography, based on no more evidence than is necessary in order to carry out the comparison, since to pursue either text into its historical context would be to pursue its intended meaning and no longer to compare it with the other. The essays aim to imagine an eighteenth-century judgement on a fourteenth-century text, intended not to support such a judgement, but to imagine what Gibbon would have said of Ibn Khaldun and to understand each the better by doing so; in particular, to show how the former would have responded to the latter as he has become known to us since the twentieth century.

This piece is an essay review of Wang Hui's book China from Empire to Nation-State, which is a translation of the introduction to Wang's four-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. According to the reviewer, Wang studies less the modern history of China than its historicity and does so in the context of China's transition from being an empire, inhabiting a cosmos that is the product of its own self-reflection, to being one among a number of nation-states, inhabiting a number of histories of their own, all of which are now simultaneously present. But the Euro-American terms empire and nation-state, which increasingly pervade Chinese perceived realities, lack precise Chinese equivalents. Meanwhile, the terms that the Chinese use in referring to the same historical transition, tianli and gongli, are obscure to the Euro-American mind. The reviewer asks whether the Chinese, now facing a plurality of histories, wonder if there may be a plurality of li, as well, or at least if there can be a li that is “universal” in the sense that it is common to them all. The problem here, the reviewer argues, in part derives from Wang's binaries being Hegelian, while the breakdown of the nation-state in Europe projects a postpolitical order in which human communities are incapable of state-based action or of determining their own li. The review ends by questioning whether China is capable of following this path and, in any case, whether Wang's vocabulary is able to encompass it.

ABSTRACTThis essay is speculative in character. It is the work of a historian who has completed a study, written on certain principles, of the first three volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and does not intend to advance to a similar study of the second three. He does, however, believe that such a study would differ profoundly from that he has constructed of the first trilogy and wishes to offer hypotheses as to why this should be so. All hypotheses invite falsification, and he will make statements about the second trilogy and its hypothetical construction which invite research with results to which they may or may not stand up. To do this will be an exercise in the history of historiography, a sub-discipline still in progress of establishing itself. It will also give the author the opportunity of extending certain generalizations he was led to advance in writing and completing his study of Gibbon’s first trilogy, and of enquiring whether they remain valid in the light of a study of the second – given that this study is still at a hypothetical stage.

ABSTRACTJohn Pocock gave “A method, a model and Machiavelli” as a talk at Princeton University in 1968. What happened to the text afterwards is uncertain, but it remained in the papers of Professor Donald Weinstein until his death in 2015, when it was identified by his widow Beverly Parker as being of importance. The text is especially revealing about Pocock’s attitudes to the history of ideas/intellectual history in the late 1960s and more especially the state of the grand project that became The Machiavellian Moment some years later.

This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to which the term “Enlightenment” may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it. The things are connected, but not continuous; they cannot be reduced to a single narrative; and we find ourselves using the word “Enlightenment” in a family of ways and talking about a family of phenomena, resembling and related to one another in a variety of ways that permit of various generalizations about them. We are not, however, committed to a single root meaning of the word “Enlightenment,” and we do not need to reduce the phenomena of which we treat to a single process or entity to be termed “the” Enlightenment. It is a reification that we wish to avoid, but the structure of our language is such that this is difficult, and we will find ourselves talking of “the French” or “the Scottish,” “the Newtonian” or the “the Arminian” Enlightenments, and hoping that by employing qualifying adjectives we may constantly remind ourselves that the keyword “Enlightenment” is ours to use and should not master us.

Barbarism and Religion - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the title of an acclaimed sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. This is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians of ideas, challenging the idea of 'The Enlightenment' and positing instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. Professor Pocock argues that the English Enlightenment of which Gibbon was part was an ecclesiastical as well as a secular phenomenon, one of several Protestant Enlightenments distinct from that of the Parisian philosophes, and part of the reconstitution of Europe after the wars against Louis XIV. The whole sequence is concerned less with the specific historiography of the Roman Empire than with the cultural history of Europe in the eighteenth century.